Here at TTAG, we love the lowly Mosin-Nagant. I waxed historical about it last September, and Ralph just taught you all you need to know about its care, grooming and feeding. From buttplate to bayonet, the cheap and ugly Russian utters a sturdy Proletariat challenge: Mock me at your peril, capitalist pig! Today’s object of desire is built on a Mosin-Nagant action, but it is neither cheap, ugly, nor Russian.

The Finnish M28/76 is a training and competition rifle built from the handpicked barrels and actions of older standard-pattern Finnish Mosin-Nagants, the M28/30 and M39. Those older Finnish Mosins were already the finest and most accurate Mosins ever built, and the handbuilt M28/76 took their best parts and combined them with a biathlon-style target stock, a bent bolt, and diopter sights.

The result was a sub-M.O.A. target rifle, and the Finns liked it so much they used it as the starting point for another sniper rifle, the ultra-rare TAK-85 shown here. Notice the family resemblance?

TAK-85s were handbuilt in 1984 and 1985 on remanufactured M28/30 receivers (some of them dating back to the 1890s) and new-production Valmet barrels, and were topped with glass from either Schmidt & Bender or Zeiss. Despite being built on receivers nearly 100 years old, TAK-85s were far from obsolete: the UK’s standard sniper rifle was the L42A1, a heavily modified Lee-Enfield in 7.62×51.

So I confess that the OOD headline was a bit of a teaser: the M28/76 is pretty cool (and unlike the TAK-85, you can actually buy one) but the TAK-85 is probably the ‘Ultimate’ Mosin-Nagant: both the best and the last of the line.

They’re not that hard to find right now, but there aren’t many left out there. Just like the Swedish Mausers, the supply will dry up and they’ll become scarce collectibles. This will never happen with Russian Mosins…

Any blog that favors maximum individual rights; believes the rule of law and strong support of private property rights are vital for a free and stable society; believes the 1st, 2d and 10th Amendments are particularly important in protecting essential individual freedoms and limiting a voracious centralized government; yet can also make a subtle reference to a 35-year-old art film, well, that blog is my kind of place.

Bravo. The fact that you can make such a cultural reference, (rightly) confident that a significant portion of the readership recognizes it, says volumes. Not just about TTAG, but also the widely varied intellectual and cultural interests of those who hold that our Founding Fathers were not just extraordinarily gifted and dedicated men, but were also so honest and committed to individual liberty that we today can with absolute safety accept that they meant every bit of what they so clearly said when they brought forth both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

But now you’ve got me giggling about the possibility that we might one day see a post entitled, Mannlicher-Carcano found in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.